


Chicken Scratch (or the misadventures of grunkle stan and his shitty goddamn handwriting)

by KukuiOlelo



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: ADHD!mabel, Gen, Jewish Pines Family, Learning Disabilities, Shitty teachers, Smart Grunkle Stan, autistic!Dipper, autistic!Ford, dysgraphia, dysgraphic!Grunkle Stan, its kind of background though, lowkey stangst lets be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-14 13:38:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 10,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9183916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KukuiOlelo/pseuds/KukuiOlelo
Summary: Back in my day, they just called kids like us stupid.Mabel thinks Stan has a learning disability. Dysgraphia, she called it. But Stan doesn't understand. He's dumb, an idiot. that was decided by teachers and kids on the playground a long time ago. But, as Mabel tries to explain, his memories slip back to a time long ago in Glass Shard Beach.





	1. Pencils and Paperwork

So it turns out it’s called dysgraphia

All of it, the pain in his hand, the messy scrawl of penmanship of his younger years, the preference for capital letters once he was out of the unwavering regulation of uptight teachers that sneered at the way he wrote and called it laziness, it was all because of this.

Mabel was the one who told him about it, bless her heart. She brought it up when she saw him filling out forms, his hand cramped awkwardly around the pen as he wrote out each capitalized letter with a thrid graders precision in a font too big for the boxes. He paused to shake out his hand with a muffled curse and switched his grip on the pen, from between his pointer and middle finger to an almost fist, first three digits curled around its shaft. Mabel leaned against the table, eyes tracking the pen as it formed clumsy letters across the paper, and Stan lifted the finished page to place it on the completed pile, rubbing at the imprints he had left on the sheet below.

“Ya’know, Grunkle Stan, you write just like that girl in my extended time testing section.”

Stan looked up, brows furrowed, “What the heck is extended time? Is this some new school thing?”

Mabel laughed, “No, Grunkle Stan, it’s for kids with learning differences” and he stiffened at that because different, different like Ford’s hands were different, different that gets you beat up on the playground and avoided in the hallway, different like how he could never be, because being the dumb brother of the six fingered freak was enough, different- but Mabel was still talking, “-get extra time on tests, that way we can keep up! I get an extra hour, Dipper goes in the teacher's office so it’s not so loud...”

Stan forced himself to relax. He didn’t know where she was coming from “Yeah, yeah, no one’s giving you two flak right? I’ll punch a teacher if necessary, you know I will.” because this ain't the 60s, this ain't the 60’s and things have changed. Things have changed... right?

“No, no, it’s fine! Sure some teachers are jerks, but they know what learning differences are, and they’ve got to respect that.”

Stan bent over his paperwork, pretending to read over the next set of boxes to fill out, “Different,” he scoffed, “back in my day they just called them stupid.”

Mabels face fell. “Grunkle Stan...”

“Honey, no,” Stan back-pedalled, “No, Mabel, I don't think you're-”

“No, Grunkle Stan, you're not stupid,” she said. Stan opened his mouth and closed it again when he couldn't find any words. Mabel flapped her hands at her sides and continued. “Your handwriting. It's just like this girl in my class, and she has dysgraphia. She’s cool and funny and smart, and you're not stupid!”

Stan froze with his pen held an inch off the table. His face darkened as he remembered, not stupid, she doesn't know. She doesn't know what it's like, getting dismissed at every turn and every teacher, student, and boss thinking you’re too lazy to get it right. Being the dumb twin of the kid everyone said was going places. Being thrown to the side like an extra part, just the spare. Just- He shook himself and smiled that conman smile he’d perfected from years on the run. “Yeah, yeah, puddin. Go on, get outta here.” He ruffled her hair. “Let your Grunkle Stan work.” Mabel whined a bit as she slumped out of the room. 

As soon as Stan heard the door slam shut, he dropped his smile. His writing hand twinged and he hissed. He dropped the pen and slouched in his chair, thumb digging into his hand hard to work out the cramp. He’d been gripping the pen too tight, he thought. That always happened when he wrote for as long as he did. His grip would start out normal, sure, but give it time and he’d curl his fingers tighter and tighter and his letters wavered and blurred into not much more than chicken scratch. He stretched his hand again, feeling the stiff curl in his thumb. 

Maybe- No. No, Mabels a good kid, but she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t remember, she doesn’t know about how people are. People are mean, she doesn't know that yet. You have to keep up, if you can’t the world isn’t gonna make exeptions. He was stupid, couldn’t they just leave it at that? He’d done his rounds in sales, if you could call those scams that, and he’d learned that well enough. It takes one to know one, right? Takes a moron to cheat a moron, and honestly, if those schmucks bought something advertised as “a total sham,” they seemed to be about his level. 

He picked up the pen again and flipped to the next page. He had to have this done soon, and the folks down at the town hall would take ‘my hand hurt’ as an excuse. The words were getting messier, though, the clerks might not even be able to read them. The chair squeaked as he stood up, and a few joints did too. The shop might need tending to, who knew what Wendy could be getting up to at the counter. He wondered if Mabel could be right, if she really did know something he didn’t. It didn’t matter anyway, he was too old to change. 

The door swung shut, and the office was left silent and empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dysgraphia is a learning disability that causes trouble with written espression, including handwriting. Troubles can arise from capital and lowercase letters, backwards letters such as Bs and Ds, word spacing, and large font. Other symptoms include an awkward pencil grip, poor fine motor skills, pain when writing, and poor spelling. 
> 
> and yes it really does hurt that much
> 
> Shoutout to my dad for not admitting he's dyslexic, despite constant problems reading for his entire life and being an actual special ed teacher, for actual years after I brought it up.


	2. Paternalism, Pain, and Penmanship

Growing up in Glass Shard Beach New Jersey was the kind of boring that made smart people do dumb things. Fortunately, the number of dumb things possible was severely limited. Not even the most hardened drug dealer set up shop, five minutes in the Lead Paint district and they left town for greener and more Gentile pastures.

Stan worked out just how dull Glass Shard Beach was when Ford came home to whine about the library’s nonfiction selection. He’d read everything, and he meant everything, available in the dusty, too hot library that could only be described as yellowed, with beige paint that may have at some point been white, old yellow books, and an air of tedium. Stan liked the tiny poetry section more than Ford’s nerd stuff, anyway, and when his twin was still sulking on the third consecutive day, he set himself to get Ford down out of the house, even if he had to drag him kicking and screaming.

That’s how everything started, right? They found the Stan ‘O War in that cave, rotted to all hell, and started the project that defined their entire childhood. What always stuck out more to him, though, the one thing he could remember crystal clear about that day, was- well, you never forget the day you realise you're dumb as a tack.

Crampelter was a bastard, and everyone in town knew it. He was a jerk and a bully, and the only reason no one said anything was because the guy’s father owned the only grocery store in a ten mile radius. Not even the most pissed off parent wanted to go screwing with the man that sold them their food. Kids were pretty much left to their own, it was their fight to fight with Crampelter, not one for the adults, but that wasn’t the worst thing. Crampelter was so nasty and so hard to fight because everything he said was God’s truth, or at least his God’s. So when he started going after Mary Ellen’s ratty clothes or Jack Reuter’s mother, no one could argue, because they knew somehow whatever that jerk threw out would be the truth.

Crampelters arrival was heralded by the clean squeak of new bike gears and a rock to the back of Ford’s head. “Well, if it ain’t the loser twins.” Stan stood up, because like hell was some jerk gonna pick on his brother, and yelled at him to get lost.

Then came that one thing no kid, no matter how big or how smart could deflect. Those things everyone thinks, but doesn't say, they’re left unsaid for a reason. Crampelter, on the other hand- “Listen, dorks, and listen good. You’re a six fingered freak, and you’re just a dumber, sweatier version of him.” The rest of the encounter disappeared in the blur of memory, ending in Stan comforting Ford about his fingers, and no one saying nothing about how Stan felt.

That was the first time anyone said it to his face. His Ma always said he had character, and his Pa never said much of anything. He always thought Ford would have given him a heads up, some kind of warning or subtle little hint, but hey, Sixer was in his own world. He should have worked it out himself, the way the teachers side eyed every writing assignment he turned in, no matter how hard he worked on it. Sometimes they just gave him a B, no questions asked and no notes left in the margins like for the other kids. Some of them just scrawled a big red F over the top. The best would call him up to the front before recess, even if he hated to let Ford go out on the playground alone, and asked him to read what he wrote, and with those teachers he never got below a B+.

One teacher though, in sixth grade, the first year he and Ford got split up. She called him up to her desk a week into the new year with a simpering smile. Stan was used to this song and dance by now, or at least he thought he was. She spoke soft and slow, like to a little kid or a stray dog. “Stanley, I would like to talk about your penmanship.”

Of course this was it. They’d turned in their first set of worksheets, and he knew his looked even worse than usual. “Good. Now I know you can do better, Stanley.” She smiled in a way she probably meant as comforting. “You just need to work harder.”

He looked at his shoes. He didn’t want to say that he’d tried already, teachers don’t like that. He kept quiet, and she continued. “Now I want you to practise tonight, can you do that? I want to help you, I know you can do it.” She presented him with a stack of lined paper and a shiny new bic pen. He swallowed and nodded and took the papers without another word. A rock hit him in the arm as he walked out of the classroom, and he heard Crampelter and his goons laugh. He ducked his head low and kept moving.

It hurt. Stan clutched the pen in his hand tighter and tighter with each line as the pens marks dug deep ghosts into the cover of the library book he was using as a table. He winced and rubbed at the marks, the librarian would have his head. He took a breath and started with the next sentence, _the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy Dog tHe quik brown fox jumpeD ovr the lazy Dog thE quick brow FoX juMpe-_ The last letters of the word fell of the edge of the paper and Stan made a noise of exasperation, scratching out the last line with vigor. He heard the rungs on the side of the bunk bed creak, and Ford appeared sans glasses at the foot of his bed.

Ford rubbed at his eyes. “Stan, why are you still up? We’ve got school tomorrow.”

Stan didn’t make eye contact as he shrugged. “Miss Snyder’s making me practice my writing.” He scratched out another misaligned word. “Don’t know why she thinks it’ll do nothing.” His hand cramped up again and he hissed, shaking it out with a grimace.

“Is your hand okay?” Ford asked. Stan shrugged as Ford took his hand. He poked at the pad of Stan’s thumb. “It doesn’t look like a sprain, but it’s all red. Did you get in a fight with Crampelter again?”

Stan drew his hand back maybe a little too quickly. “Nah, it just gets like this when I write.” He flexed his hand a few times and picked up the pen again, trying his best to ignore the twinge of his muscles. “Go back to bed, Sixer.”

Ford leaned over to look at the papers. “Wow, that looks bad.” Stan drew them back quickly. “I think it’s getting worse.”

Stans shoulders slumped. “She keeps saying I just have to work harder,” he said. “She says it’ll improve if I just practice but I can’t. I just keep working and working and it never gets any better. Nothing works.” He curled his knees up to his chest. “Maybe I’m just too stupid to get it right.”

Ford paused for a second too long. “You’re not stupid,” he said, and Stan chuckled hollowly. “Have you tried my glasses?” Stan looked up. “Maybe you just can’t see it right, here.” Ford hastened to grab his glasses from where they hung from the top bunk, but Stan shook his head.

“That’s not the problem. I can see just fine.” That last part was a lie. He tried on Fords glasses once, out on the playground in 5th grade, and he had been amazed to see the leaves on the trees and a seagull trying to eat a bit of glass down on the beach. He’d shoved them back at Ford with a laugh and a snarky remark about nerd cooties.

Ford deflated a bit and sat back down. “Maybe if you held the pen different.” Ford took the pen from Stan’s hand like he was going to demonstrate. “You hold it all funny, and I read improper technique can cause-”

“No,” Stan cut him off. “That doesn’t work either.” He took the pen back from Ford. “Go back to bed, Ford.” He kept his eyes on the paper and started another line. He heard the rungs creak again and a rustling of fabric as Ford climbed back up into his bed and a click as he turned his light off.

_The quick brown fox jumps over the lazY dog the quciKbroWn fox JumPeD oer the laSv Dog tHquCkBr-_ He threw his pen down and gritted his teeth against a growl. The letters wavered more and more between the lines and grew larger and larger as he wrote. He picked up the pen and scratched out another line, nearly tearing through the paper. His grades had never been good, but now they were slipping even more. The math teacher marked everything with a big red “show your work,” the history teacher crossed out whole lines in his papers, when she could read them, with a pointed reminder to stay on topic, and science blurred like a Van Gogh painting without Ford around to help.

He clenched the pen tighter in his hand and it twinged. He wasn’t even sure if it was worth it, to keep trying. Ford wouldn’t care, at least. They could talk for hours, even when Ford descended into technobabble or tilted his head to the side like a puppy when Stan started waxing poetic about some new verse or paragraph that he just couldn’t get out of his head.

Everyone else cared though. They took one look at his handwriting and knew how dumb he was. A first grader could write leaps and bounds better than him, and he’d seen those looks from his Ma and the teachers. They cared and they saw and there was nothing he could do about it, save trying to be louder than he was dumb.

He turned the paper over and kept writing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (why is there no noun form of patronizing)
> 
> Shoutout to the 5th grade teacher who gave me actual pages of writing homework a night to make me work harder and stop being lazy with my handwriting. It worked about as well as you’d think, thanks a lot, Pamela


	3. Banter and Baseball

In the windswept summers on Glass Shard Beach, near nothing could be heard better than the boys practicing baseball down by the pier. How the coach kept the team together in the dead of summer, when there wasn’t nothing on kids minds except the sweet release of freedom, was a mystery not even The Shadow could weasel out the answer to. Rumors had it blackmail was involved, but those were founded in nothing but the salty fishy beach air. 

Try outs came on the second week of summer, long enough to get bored but not enough to find anything to fill the void just yet. Stan took about a minute to weigh his options, before deciding “screw it,” and he walked down to the sandy brown field next to the pier to try his luck. The sun was hot and blinding, and he had to squint even more than usual to make out the set up. Boys were clamoring around a black board with a busted wheel and scrabbling at each other to get the chalk. He walked up to a kid that he guessed knew the scoop. “Hey, what’s going on,” he asked.

The boy pointed to the board. “You’ve gotta write down your name before you go out,” he said. “It’s gonna take a while though. There’s never enough chalk.” Stan nodded, and waded through the crowd. He took a piece of chalk from a kid trying to squeeze out of the group and bumped his way to the center. He wrote his name on the board as neatly as he could, but the letters were too small and the chalk wobbled in his hand. 

“Wow, your writing sucks.” Some boy a few rows back yelled. Stan stiffened and the chalk he was holding snapped. 

“Yeah,” He laughed, a bit strained, “What can I say?”

The boy pointed, and another kid bumped him in the side. “Hey!” He turned back to Stan. “Maybe you were supposed to be a lefty,” he said, “Like you tried to switch and never got used to it.” Stan had tried that, and it’d worked just about as well as everything else, but he smiled. Some kids around him nodded, looking contemplative.

“We could use a lefty on the team,” an older boy said. A chorus of yeahs sounded from the group. 

Stan shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know-”

He got cut off by more talking from the group. “If he’s a lefty, maybe we could have him bat!”

“Or he could pitch.”

“Shut up, that’s my job.”

“Well you suck at it!” The conversation turned from Stan to the hypothetical lefty the boys were creating. In a few minutes, the coach blew a whistle at a distance far less than necessary for a whistle, and the boys fell into line. They practiced throwing and catching on the field. Stan tried switching hands, warming up his shoulder and whipping the ball hard as he could, but his shots flew wide, nearly rolling into the surf. He switched back again, hoping no one would notice, and tried to drown out his thoughts in the chatter of his partner.

An hour passed and Stan threw his glove on the pile with finality. He could still hear a few of the boys chattering about that same hypothetical lefty, listing out pitchers and catchers and shortstops from the big leagues. Someone yelled back at him as he turned to leave, “See ya, lefty.” Stan didn’t turn until he reached the Lead Paint district, rolling his short sleeves back down off his shoulders. 

That was the last time that summer he went down by the pier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come on, comment! dont be shy  
> Shoutout to the kids in my middle school softball team who kept asking if I was left handed, equally due to my shitty handwriting and inability to throw straight  
> also shoutout to my dad for being old enough to remember who the shadow is. you know thats history now, right?


	4. Dickinson and Dubiety

Middle school came and went and the twins polarized like a needle ran across a magnet. Ford became the star student to everyone except the gym teacher. He took to physics and algebra like a fish to water and won the school every academic award within the grasp of their tiny little town. He read even more, testing his own theories and experiments down by the beach in the waves, and spent more time in the library than in his own bed, which had become a library of it’s own. 

Stan, on the other hand, ran against his brother’s example like a pair of misaligned gears. He’d started boxing, originally as a counter to Crampelter’s relentless strong arming, and had gotten good enough to win almost every match and get Crampelter and his gang permanently off his back. He flirted relentlessly, even if most of his endeavors ended in disaster. He caused trouble in class on principle and copied off of Ford’s tests enough that the teachers nearly gave up. 

There was one class, though, that Stan actually enjoyed. No, it wasn’t gym or lunch, though those made their way into the top three. English was the one bright spot in his day. He’d sit up front, even without Fords prompting, and volunteered to read aloud despite his thickening New Jersey accent. It was the only class where he’d rush in the door and leave with a spring in his step and for which he’d complete the homework without complaint or outright pressure. He’d never say it to Ford or Pa or any of the guys, but he thought he might even be almost good at it. 

The unit on poetry was slated for November, but was moved up a month after the other boys wouldn’t stop turning Shakespeare lines into dick jokes and Miss Hotchberg officially lost the last shreds of her hope. Stan wanted to point out the incessant pointed references to Benvolio's “sword” were probably closer to the original spirit of the thing, seriously, Shakespeare would be proud, but somehow he felt like that wouldn’t make her feel any better.  

Miss Hotch, as they all called her, read their new assignment with all the enthusiasm of, well, her students.  “You are to compose a poem, of at least one page in length, emulating the style of one of the poets we have discussed. You will be graded on style, grammar, subject matter, and-” She put down her papers and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Just write something and at least make an effort to make it coherent. And I don’t want to read thirty poems about the damn Juke Joint. Please, just try to be original.” The bell rang and everyone stood to leave. Stan lingered at his desk until the last of the students filed out of the class. He had an image to maintain, after all. 

“Miss?” He walked up to Miss Hotch’s desk. “Do you care what time the poets come from? I’m tryin’ to choose.”

She barely looked up from her papers. “What poet do you like the best then?”

He responded immediately. “Emily Dickinson.” Miss Hotch looked up in surprise. He continued. “I meant, what movement should we be doing? Like, we mostly studied Naturalism and Romanticism and Transcendentalism and all that, but could we go into Modernism and Harlem and some of that more recent stuff.” She looked at him, eyes wide and jaw slack. “Miss?” 

“Uh,” She seemed to shake herself. “I am more familiar with the 19th century, but if you want to, I suppose you can do your own study.” 

He smiled at her and shouldered his bag. “Thanks, Miss!” He left the classroom, hoping no one could see that he was grinning.   

Stan liked Emily Dickinson. He remembered picking up a book of her poems from the library in first grade and devouring the whole thing that afternoon. He liked how she talked about death and nature and God, even if her God wasn’t the same one as his. Honestly, Ford could use a good reading of  _ Faith is a fine invention,  _ if you asked him, even if he probably wouldn't pick up half of the subtleties. 

Also you could sing most of her poems to the tune of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” No one has to know he’s actually humming along to  _ Because I could not stop for death _ instead of that Coke commercial _.  _

He settled on Emily Dickinson for the assignment, and inspiration struck while sitting with Ford in the Stan ‘O War. “Hey Sixer,” he said, “Write this down for me.” Ford looked quizzical, then turned to a fresh page in his spiral notebook and nodded. Stan spoke, letting the images flow through his mind and into words, occasionally humming a few bars to get the meter right in his head. He thought about his future and his emotions as best he could and wrapped them up in descriptions of nature and careful half rhymes. He spoke the last line and leaned back against the mast. “You got that?” he asked Ford. 

“I think so.” Ford ripped the paper out of his notebook and handed it to him. “Does it look correct?” Stan read through Ford's neat cursive. 

“Yeah, looks great. Hand me your pen, will ya?” Stan read through it again, more carefully this time, adding Dickinson’s trademark dashes in between the words. “Thanks a million.” He signed his name at the top and couldn't help but notice the stark contrast between his handwriting and Fords. He read it once more and smirked. “Thanks Sixer, I might snag a B in a class yet.”

Miss Hotch called him to her desk the day after they turned in the poems. Around fifteen papers out of the thirty students found their way to her desk, and she sighed like she was disappointed, but not surprised. He eyed the papers on her desk as he walked up to the front. “What is it, Miss?”

“Sit.” She gestured at a chair, already pulled up alongside her desk. Stan sat, more that a little wary. “Stanley, you know plagiarism is against the rules here.” He blinked, thrown off guard, but she continued. “You can’t rely on your brother for your whole life.” She took out his poem, and Stans jaw clenched when he saw the red F in the top corner. “I am giving you a chance to redo this assignment for partial credit, if your brother does not ‘help’ you this time.”

“Woah, woah, woah, wait.” he interrupted. “You think I had Ford-” He froze at the look she was giving him. “Sorry, Miss. But you think Ford wrote this?” She nodded. “I’m sorry, but he can’t write worth a cent, why would I cheat off  _ him. _ ”

Miss Hotch pursed her lips. “Stanford is in another one of my classes, Stanley, I can recognize his handwriting.” She looked across at him sternly. “And you do have a reputation.” 

Stan sputtered. “He didn’t write this.” He reached across and picked up the paper. “I asked him to write it down for me, that’s it. You’ve seen my handwriting, it’s junk.” He ran a finger over the grade on his paper. 

“Stanley, lying will not make this easier for you. You can still redo the assignment.”

“No, I wrote this.” He gave the paper back to her. “Listen.” He closed his eyes and recited the first stanza.

 

“A gust without a form or bite

Tugs at half sewn sails -

And yet we sigh, drained of fight

With our anxieties curtailed”

 

It wasn’t his best work, if he was going to be honest, but he still knew it by heart. He opened his eyes and saw Miss Hotch scanning over the first lines critically. “See?”

“Stanley, this does not prove-”

“I wrote it when I was sitting with my brother on the boat, you can ask him.” Stan knew he was getting too riled up. “I wrote it about the beach and our boat and how worried we are about the future.” She tried to say something, but he kept talking. “I tried to include slant rhymes, because that's what Emily Dickinson does a lot. I punctuated with dashes too, and kept the entire thing in her meter. I wrote this.” He’d half stood out of his chair at some point, and Miss Hotch looked a bit flabbergasted. “Sorry, Miss.” He sat back down and looked down at his hands. 

“Alright Stanley.” He looked up. She was adding his poem back to the pile of ungraded papers. “I will ask your brother about this. I will be handing these back Monday. Have a good weekend.” He stood and took his bag from next to his desk. As he reached the door, he paused and turned back. 

“Miss?” She turned to look at him. “Don’t give Ford a hard time, please? You know how he gets under pressure.” She nodded and he turned to go, trying to ignore the lump that had lodged itself in his throat.

Stan barely glanced at the A- on his paper, right next to the crossed out F. The guy next to him whistled. “Damn Pines, how’d that happen.” He turned just enough to smirk and went back to looking out the window. 

That night, he gathered the poetry books strewn across his room and returned them all to the library.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let this be proof that I can not write in verse worth shit and I never have to try again
> 
> Sincere shout out to my kindergarten teacher who took the time to transcribe my poems for me after she noticed I had trouble writing legibly. She was a saint, too good for this world.


	5. Forgery and Fronts

To say life on the streets was tough is an unnecessary statement. Unnecessary is too weak of a word for it, really. Self evident, or maybe "no shit, Sherlock," would be a better fit. It’s on the level of obvious as saying “prison food kind of sucks” or “Ford is not great with women.”

At least, Stan thought Ford was still bad with women. He'd always stuttered and laughed a bit too much for friendly. Once he tried to flirt with Sally Mason down at the Juke Joint and flubbed it so bad Stan had to go down to the pier and talk down her older brothers from hunting Ford down. He came home late to find Ford curled up in every blanket in their room and mumbling a mix of self-sacrificing gripes and mathy equations Stan couldn't identify if a gun was held to his head.  He'd climbed up to the top bunk and flopped down next to Ford. After a second he'd rolled over onto Ford's back just like he did when they were kids and started talking, no real direction to it, just running his mouth on baseball stats and stories from history and a few half remembered poems from somewhere in the back of his mind, and Ford started to relax under him. He wriggled his way out of the blankets a half an hour later and agreed they'd both laugh about it later.

Later never came, though. The Science Fair had come half a month later, and everything shattered like an old beer bottle on the beach. Stan wondered how Ford was doing. He probably got his degree, something nerdy Stan didn't even know how to pronounce, let alone understand, and was some big wig scientist by now with grant money and five degrees to his name. Or maybe not. Maybe West Coast Tech really was his only shot, the only opportunity for Ford to live up to that potential their teachers always talked about. Maybe Stan had screwed all that up, screwed over his brothers entire life, and he was the only one to blame for it.

Another obvious statement, Stan’s hand hurt. It ached in the tendon deep way it did when he spent too long holding a pen, an itch just under the pad of his thumb that he just couldn’t scratch. That pain seemed to be the only consistency in all of this, and he’d almost be grateful for that, except for, well, the fact that it sucked. Rico’s latest dugout was humid and dim, and somehow still too hot despite the rainstorm raging outside. The hotshots were camped out around the fire talking in rapid fire Spanish. Rico turned towards the guys and Stan snapped his eyes back to his work. He was assigned to copy the signatures on to their counterfeit visas. He practiced the jagged squiggle of a signature again, but he just couldn’t get it right. Something was off about it, too stiff and with a few too many hesitations on the upticks. It looked like he'd tried to copy something and that wouldn't fly. He put down his pen to shake out his hand.

 “ _What the hell is this, Pinefield?_ ” Rico snarled next to him. Stan jumped, he hadn't even noticed him stand up. He straightened the papers and didn’t make eye contact. “ _I said, what the hell is this?_ ” Rico slammed his hand down on the makeshift table. Stan was still a bit slow on the uptake with his Spanish. It always caught for half a second in his brain, and he knew he needed to improve, and fast. If he was a bit too slow sometime soon, a bit too slow to recognize the words "get down" or "put down your weapon," it could be the end of him. The streets weren't too friendly to beginners.

Stan caught a few of the other guys sneaking glances his way. He glanced over towards them a bit desperately, for what, he didn't know. He responded in broken, stilted Spanish. “ _I am practicing the signature, señor._ ”

He heard Rico scoff. “ _Are you some kind of_ chueco, _Pinefield?_ ” Stan didn’t know that word, but he read enough from context to get what Rico meant. Chances were, it was the same thing meant back at Glass Shard Beach and by angry customers asking what the hell was wrong with him.

 _“No, señor.”_ Stan shook his head.

Rico snatched the pen off of the table and snarled. _“Are you stupid?”_ Stan shook his head _. "Are you stupid, chueco?_ " He was brandishing the pen in Stan's face, the point was only inches from his eye. He shook his head again and Rico snorted. “ _Then sign it right, moron._ ” Rico threw the pen back down. “ _Get back to work._ ”  Stan kept his eyes on the table as Rico walked back to the fire. He watched as Rico settled with the other hotshots, saying something in rapid Spanish while gesturing back towards Stan. He picked up the pen and tried again, signing the name carefully onto the visa. He tried his best to ignore the ache in his hand and kept working.

They passed the border with little incident besides a raised eyebrow at Stan’s accented Spanish. He found himself back in America a few months later, and if he didn't still owe Rico money, he’d have skipped town and gone straight back to Jersey if he had to. He was the talker now, and if that wasn’t a weird feeling. Apparently he had the most believable accent. He’d have to agree, there wasn't much more believable than Jersey.

He'd earned a new nickname too. It was more Spanish, some slang that you couldn't find in a book. He never asked what it meant, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. They didn't need forgers anymore, what they needed now were fast talkers and good getaway drivers, and Stan found himself feeling relieved.  The nickname stuck, though, and it got thrown at him in biting tones and in jest after a few too many drinks.

Somehow Stan let it slip that he used to box back in high school. Now, instead of grunt work and lookout, he was assigned to some higher risk jobs, taking out guards, running drugs, roughing up some punk, whatever Rico wanted. But he didn’t have to write no more, and he didn’t have to explain nothing to no one.

His ID was now for an Andrew Alcatraz, but his signature was as messy as ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please forgive the google translate Spanish. 
> 
> yeah, ive got nothing. shoutout to my dad for knowing an impressive and mildly worrying amount about organized crime in hawaii. thanks, I guess?


	6. Notetaking and Necessity

The Mystery Shack was easier. Even with the memories running through Stan's mind, it was a roof over his head and a semi dependable stream of income.  Making signs is easier than forging a signature. They’re almost like art, with broad strokes and straight edged lines and it didn’t matter how you held the pencil while you did it. Stan could spend hours measuring out the spacing and the lines, carefully painting in the letters with a steady brush. His hand didn't shake like it did when he wrote by hand, and the lines went where he wanted. Like that, he could get lost, forget.

Taxidermy was easier too. It was methodical and slow, and for some reason he didn’t understand, the slow stitching of the needle didn’t make his hand ache. There was something satisfying about it, to sit down with a skin and come out with something he could be proud of. Tours were less stressful than drug deals. He could run his mouth a mile a minute, making up whatever came into his head, and he’d get paid to do it. And, if someone wanted a refund, the encounter wouldn't end with a gun to his head.

The last few customers left the gift shop and he locked the door behind them with a sigh. He’d have to check the cash register, eat something, maybe straighten a bit of the merchandise. He took off his hat and threw it on the counter. The tip jar had a few quarters and a bottle cap in it, better than yesterday, at least. He opened the cash register and stepped to the side before the drawer could sock him in the stomach like usual. What had Stan’s life come to, that he’s actually getting used to the world's worst cash register. Then he reminded himself that less than a year ago he chewed his way out of the trunk of a car. Things could be worse.

A sharp gust of wind blew open the window, and Stan raced over to close it. The portal though, that reminder of Ford and everything that went wrong, that wasn’t easy like the gift shop. Stan dropped his jacket down next to his hat and entered the code into the door behind the snack machine. Ford fell into the portal two months ago, it felt like an age, and Stan had made what felt like zero progress in those months. Ford's notes were near incomprehensible, full of sciency terms and technobabble. He’d found a copy of Particle Physics for Complete Idiots, and spent the last several weeks sifting through the jargon.

And Stan had to take notes. He had to take notes, the way they tried to teach back in school and he had to use for the few incomprehensible science classes before he straight up gave up. He couldn't give up on this, though, and he couldn’t do things the way he liked to, scanning through the information until it sank into his brain. It wouldn’t stick, every word went in one ear and out the other without even stopping for gas in between.

The stairs creaked under his feet as he walked down into the basement. It was getting colder than usual down there, must be the winter coming. Stan took out his notes and the physics book and opened to the next chapter. The page opened with a long paragraph, only about half of it real words, as far as Stan was concerned.  He got through the introduction and a few lines of notes before his hand started to cramp. He hissed and threw the pen down in frustration.

He can’t do this. Why the hell did he think he could actually do this? Ford’s trapped in there, he might not even be alive. Who knows what’s on the other side of that portal, he’d said it drove his assistant mad just looking in for a second. And what the hell could Stan do anyway? He wasn’t his brother, Ford was the smart one, he understood this stuff, he built all of this. He did something with his life and Stan just screwed it all up.

Stan’s thumb ached like the lump in his throat, but he had to get Ford back. He had to try to fix yet another mess he got them into, or, well, die trying. He shifted his grip on the pen and turned another page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (good lord ive created a woobie)  
> notetaking sucks, so do in class essays. thank god for computers, seriously.
> 
> Sincere shoutout to my dad, who despite everything, is currently the most educated member of the family and has something like three college degrees and an actual career in the arts and graphic design. Yay!!


	7. Research and Recognition

Dysgraphia. The word felt weird on his tongue still, and he was sure he was mispronouncing it somehow. The TV was playing something Stan had watched a hundred times, some spinoff of The Duchess Approves. It was a Tuesday, and he’d left the shop with Wendy in charge. No tourist ever stopped in on a Tuesday, it was one of those dead zones he could never work out. The twins ran off around to the woods again around noon, with Dipper babbling about “those gnomes again” and Mabel carrying a pair of knitting needles with glee. Learning differences. Dysgraphia. It’d been a week since Mabel brought it up, and Stan’s instinctive, thick skinned defensiveness at the idea was fading as he thought more and more.

The TV switched to an ad break. The library would be open today. He never visited much, and the library card he found on the table when he first opened the Mystery Shack dated back to the days of card catalogs, but he was free for the day. He threw on his jacket and walked out through the gift shop. “Hey Wendy,” he yelled, “Keep an eye on things, I’m going out. If anything comes up, ask Soos.”

 “Yeah, sure boss.” She waved at him as he left without even looking up from her magazine and went back to tracing a finger along a line, mouthing the words as she read. Teenagers. Stan’s car coughed a few times before stating, and he made an only slightly dangerous U turn before he drove into town.

The library was just as musty and yellowed as Stan remembered it being. He felt a weird sense of deja vu as he walked through the shelves. He remembered where literature would be with pinpoint accuracy, and where to find the kind of hard sciences that made his brain ache, but finding this, Stan didn’t even know where to start. “Do you need help, sir?” The librarian at the front counter spoke, her red painted nails poised over the keyboard. 

Stan turned towards her and coughed a bit awkwardly. “Do you know where I could find books on brain stuff?” He shifted his weight a bit and crossed his arms.

The librarian looked at him over her computer. “Yeah, I’m going to need you to be more specific.”

He thought back to the words Mabel had used. “Learning differences, that kind of thing.” She raised her eyebrows and started typing on her computer. Stan added quickly, “It’s for my niece.”

“Over there,” she said, “first row, third shelf from the bottom.” She scribbled a number on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “Here’s the dewey decimal number. Good luck.” He nodded, and she smiled at him. The third shelf from the bottom was around waist level, and he had to pull up a stool to see them properly. A bright covered book with the letters ADHD emblazoned across the spine caught his eye. He turned to what looked like a list of symptoms, distractibility, fidgeting, hyper focus. It reminded him of Mabel, the way she’d bounce her foot and flap her hands when talking, and that kind of intense she got when knitting something he assumed was particularly hard, and he had to shout her name three times before she heard.

He closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Another caught his eye a few rows up and he had to stretch to grab it. Centered on the cover was the word Autism. He read a few lines and found himself thinking about Ford, the awkward way he talked, his fixation on whatever thing caught his interest, and the way he used to wiggle all six fingers in front of his eyes when he thought no one was watching. Stan smiled, almost without realizing it. He shook himself and put the book back on the shelf, and tried to think of anything other than his brother.  

He knew he needed to find something more broad reaching. There was a big heavy one a shelf down and he hoisted it into his lap. It was alphabetised, thank God. Stan turned to the Dys- section and was monetarily floored by the number of names listed. He scanned the entry for dyscalculia. No, he didn't think that fit. Stan was always good with numbers, simple ones at least. It had come in handy a few times when he had to count cards for a quick buck, he could put numbers together in his head fast enough. He turned the page.

Dyslexia, that wasn't it either. He could read just fine, pretty damn well, if he said so himself. And the letters that fell out of place on the page were do to his slipping hand, not anything out of place in his brain. He read a bit more, and something reminded him of Wendy. Sometimes she’d pause, just a bit longer than he would, to read a sign or a price tag or rub at her eyes going through a magazine, or how she’d run her fingers along a line of text as she read. Maybe he should stop complaining when she misspelled Stan as Satan. Maybe. 

Stan turned the page and rested a finger next to a word. Dysgraphia. He scanned down the list of symptoms. Illegible handwriting, incomplete letters, awkward pencil grip, pain when writing. He looked over the writing samples, some indistinguishable from his, and he remembered, illegible essays, backwards Ds and Qs and 17s, hours and hours of fruitless practice. Dysgraphia. Maybe Mabel had been onto something. He tapped the page and snapped the book closed. Dysgraphia. 

Stan found every book in the section with a mention of dysgraphia in the index and carried them to the front desk. The librarian looked at him, a bit confused, when he dropped the stack on her table, but she checked them out anyway. She almost looked impressed when he took out his, or he supposed it’s Stanford’s, library card, stiff cardstock and thirty years unrenewed. “I’m not sure if it’ll still work,” he said.

She whistled. “Don’t worry, it still works.” She typed something into the computer and frowned. “It seems you have an overdue library book from, wow, 1982.”

“You’re kidding.” Stan said. He’d been careful to return everything he checked out, just to make sure no one would come knocking. You never know with small towns. Ford must have checked it out before Stan even got there. This felt like a metaphor for something. 

“Nope. Let me just-” She typed in a few more things. She paused and a look something like incredulity passed her face. She glanced up at him, then down back at the screen.  “Do you still have a copy of ‘Jane Fonda’s Workout Book’?”

Stan stifled a laugh. “I don’t think so.” It’s been thirty years since Ford has even been on earth, and still- Stan is going to give him so much shit for that. 

The lady stared at her screen for a few more seconds. She sighed and clicked her mouse with finality. “You know what,” she said, “I am going to let this one slide.” She pushed his card and the stack of books back towards him. “Have a nice day.” 

Nothing had exploded back at the Shack, small wonders. Dipper walked circles in the yard, chewing on a pen and muttering about goddamn gnomes. Mabel sat on the porch picking twigs out of her hair, and she smiled when he walked up to the door with an armful of books. “Grunkle Stan, you went to the library?” He nodded as he set down his books on the counter.  “So,” she said, “what’cha reading?”

“None of your business, sweetie?” Stan ruffled her hair a bit absent mindedly. 

Dipper stopped chewing on his pen and looked up. “Stan owns a library card?” 

Stan chose to ignore that comment. “Wendy, anything happen when I was gone?”

She turned a page in her magazine, still the same one. “Nah. You can ask Dipper about the gnomes.” Dipper slumped into a chair and muttered something again about goddamn gnomes.

Stan looked up at the clock, quarter to four. No tourists would be coming by now, tuesday visitors always peter out around three. “Hey Wendy,” he said, “You’re off. Get outta here.”

“Really?” she said, “Thanks dude.” She jumped over the counter and ran to the door.

“Just make sure to be on time tomorrow,” Stan yelled at her retreating back. He thought he heard he yell back a faint ‘whatever.’ “Teenagers.”

“Stan, are you feeling ok?” Mabel said, head cocked to the side. Dipper turned too, eyes narrowed in his direction

“What?” 

“You let Wendy leave early,” Dipper said, “and no one’s dying.” Mabel nodded vehemently. 

“I- Aw shut up.” Mabel giggled at Stan’s scowl. “You two go scare off any customers, and I don’t want to hear anything that sounds like a lawsuit.” Dipper and Mabel ran back outside, leaving Stan alone in the gift shop. 

They were good kids, they really were. Mabel was so insistent that he wasn’t dumb, he almost believed her. Dysgraphia. He’d only known this kid for a few months, and she cared. She cared enough to tell him, to try to clue him in, to try to help. Stan smiled to himself. Mabel’s a good kid. 

Stan hefted the books up on one arm and carried them to his room. The rest of the day was clear, and he let the books fall on his bed with a soft fwump. He picked up the first, a thick red thing about special education, and began to read. He spent the rest of the afternoon, and well into the night studying the passages on Dysgraphia, Dyslexia, and ADHD what felt like five times each, committing every fact he read to memory.

And he did not, not once, have to take notes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why jane fonda? i have no story here, it was on the 1982 best seller list  
> Additionally, I do not have dyslexia, so I apologize if Wendy’s description is woefully inaccurate.
> 
> Shout out to that librarian that didn't comment on some of the books I checked out, and still gave me first pick of new books that came in. and just laughed that time I turned in a book three years after the due date. yeah that was an adventure


	8. Internet and Interest

There’s only so much you can learn from a small town library, Stan learned. He’d returned the books a few days before they were due and had been wondering in the spare time he had what more he could learn. There was a short line of computers along the back wall of the library, and Wendy told him near constantly to just Google it when he asked a question about some new bit of pop culture. It was another Tuesday, and by some miracle the twins weren't out in the woods stirring up who knows what, and instead were out in the yard engaged in the age old debate of who was really taller. They were at the point in the discussion where the evenness of the ground came into question, Mabel would bust out some variety of improvised level made with far more glitter than necessary, and Dipper would critique the validity of her design.

“Hey, Mabel,” he yelled out the back, “Come here a minute.” Mabel skipped over to the door.

“What’s up, Grunkle Stan?” she said.

“I need to do some research at the library. Like, computer research. And I might need some help.”    


Mabel smiled wickedly. “You’re gonna want Dipper for that.” She turned back towards the yard and shouted. “Hey, Dipper!” Dipper looked up at the two and nodded. “Stan needs help with the internet.”

Dipper pulled himself to his feet and brushed glitter out of his hair. “Sure.” He said. “Alrighty then, the library will be open for three and a half more hours. Do you want to go now?”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?” Stan said. Did those two coordinate this? He took a second to grab his keys and the library card he wasn’t even sure would work and got in the car. What was he going to tell Dipper? He wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell him just yet. Hell, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell anyone. After so many years of being a screw up, making this a scapegoat, letting people think he was messed up in the head or just trying to get out of doing shit, that wasn’t something he ever wanted to feel. Stan switched gears and swerved around a camping van. Dipper coughed from the back seat and checked his seatbelt. 

“So, what do you want to look up?” Dipper said. “And if it’s a felony, I don’t want to be a part of it.”

“Hey, I have layers.” Stan said. After a moment's hesitation, he answered. “Mental disorders, learning disorders, that kind of stuff.”    


Dipper shifted. “Learning disorders.” He fell silent, biting his nail. Stan ran a red light. Dipper broke the silence a moment later. “Is it because I’m autistic?”

Stan stalled a moment. He found himself for the second time thinking of Ford, those little quirks he had and the way the symptom lists for ASD mirrored his behavior with such eerie precision. He’d read through the entries on autism too, late at night due to some strange, masochistic urge to learn more, and slowly began remembering the things he’d started to forget, the equations Ford would mumble under his breath and the exact placement of his glasses on the upper bunk. Stan shook himself and switched gears. 

“Naw, kid,” he said. “It’s not that. It’s for, well, me, actually.” Stan resolutely kept his eyes on the road, but he could hear Dipper let out a sigh from the back seat. 

“Did Mabel say something?” Dipper leaned forward, still biting at his nail. “She mentioned it earlier this week, but-” He trailed off, looking curiously at Stan.

Stan drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He sighed. “Yeah, yeah she sure did, kiddo.” He made the last turn into the library parking lot and skidded to a stop.

So it turned out his card did work. Stan decided to chalk that up to more Gravity Falls weirdness and move on. He was getting kind of used to the librarian, and she helped beat the computer into submission long enough to get it booted up. Dipper pulled a chair over to the monitor and clicked on a few things too fast for Stan to follow.

Dipper typed something into the search bar and clicked open a few pages. “Dysgraphia, right? This site has more basic information and this one covers some strategies and bug fixes and stuff.” He jumped out of his chair. “I’m going to go read, call me if you need anything, ok.”  Dipper made a beeline for nonfiction and disappeared in the shelves. Stan squinted at the screen and adjusted his glasses. A few seconds later, Dipper reappeared. “And you can’t read that. I keep forgetting how blind you are.” He did something to turn up the brightness and make the font a bit bigger.

“I ain’t that old yet!” Stan said.

“Yes, you are.” Dipper quipped from the shelves. The librarian shushed them halfheartedly from her desk. Stan turned back to the screen and started to read the first site. Some of what the article said were things he’d already learned from the books he checked out, not all of it though. They used different terms, differences or disabilities instead of disorders. It emphasized that it isn’t because your kid's dumb or lazy, and it wasn’t their fault.  They talked about how dysgraphia affects kids, worse performance academically, difficulty with life skills, criticism for being lazy. They went on to say, again, that this is not the child’s fault.

Stan clicked on the next page Dipper pulled up, the one with bug fixes, as he called them. It suggested ways to stretch and strengthen his hands to get rid of the pain. Stan had always shaken his hand out as he wrote, and they suggested that as well. There were pencil grips now too, apparently, things to make sure he kept his grip right. One by one, Stan read through point after point that he wished he knew in high school. He wished he knew to take a break, rather than powering through. He wished he knew it was a problem with his brain screwing him up, that he wasn’t lazy or dumb. He wished he knew it wasn’t his fault.

He tucked the most promising strategies away in his brain and closed out of the window. He found Dipper, intently reading a book about UFOs in a back corner, and nodded to the librarian as he left. The afternoon was still young, and Stan had work to do

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> … sorry? shit happened, my computer died like a horse in a war movie, just shit happened
> 
> why is it so hard to write dipper i cant words
> 
> Shoutout to that teacher that banned me from going to the library at recess, only to be surprised when I wrote a formal letter of complaint to the principal. Really, what did you expect to happen? (i mean its not like i ever stopped going but its the principle of the thing dammit)


	9. Partnership and Poetry

Duct tape. Who knew? Stan adjusted the grip on his pen, a cheap bic wrapped up with a half a roll of duct tape, and set to work filling out yet more boxes. The weigh helped, he found, and the added size kept his grip from becoming tight and uncomfortable too quickly. That didn't mean his hand wouldn't get sore eventually, though. After a few minutes of writing, Stan stopped to stretch his hand the way he read about online.

The door creaked open and Mabel ran into the office. “Grunkle Stan-” She stopped in the door. “I can’t remember why I came in here.” She blinked off into space for a minute. “Eh, I’m sure I’ll remember it. What’cha doing?” She leaned forward against the table, peering over his desk top.

“Just some paperwork, sweetie.” He flipped over the page and read over the next page.

“You know, I could always write for you.” Mabel smiled. “I mean, I don’t have anything else to do.” She was eyeing his pen a bit curiously, but Stan pretended not to notice.

“Sure thing, hun.” He stood up and pulled up an extra chair. “You want a normal pen?”

“Yay!” Mabel climbed up into Stan’s chair. She took the took the pen from Stan and looked up expectantly.

“Alright, first box,” Stan said. “State and zip code, you know this one.”

The forms were finished in half the time it would have taken Stan alone, each necessary box filled out in Mabel's loopy neat print. Stan read them over briefly. He’d get weird looks from the folks at city hall, sure, but everyone in town knew Mabel. Maybe he should bring her with him when he went down to drop them off, that might get a few laughs. “Thanks, hun,” he said, ruffling her hair, “you're a natural.”

She straightened out her headband, grumbling half heartedly. “Does being an adult really have so much paperwork involved? I need to enjoy being a kid while I-” She slammed her hands on the table and squealed. “I remember now! Be right back.” Mabel scampered out of the room and slammed the door. Stan shrugged and straightened his desk.

She came running back in a few minutes later holding something wrapped up in newspaper and tied with a piece of yarn. “Open it!” She said, bouncing on her toes. Stan took the package from her and began tearing off the wrapping. “I found one of your old report cards in the attic and it said you really liked poetry, so here.” Stan brushed off the last of the paper and was left holding a collection of Robert Frost.

“Wow, thanks a lot, sweetie.” Stan opened the front cover to see the name  _ Gideon _ written inside in curly blue script. “Hey, did you steal this?”

Mabel grinned. “Maybe.”

Stan laughed. “That’s my girl! Come here, have you read this before?”

Stan started writing again. He took mental notes on the tourists that passed through the shop, trying to imagine their stories from little snippets of conversation. He went out into the woods, some of the more well worn paths, and he could honestly say that he finally got where Frost was coming from. He wore the book Mabel gave him down raw, and on a lazy weekday went into town to get a new copy of the Emily Dickinson book he got rid of when he was seventeen. Some afternoons, they’d gather around the TV, Mabel’s needles clicking away as she knit a new sweater, Dipper muttering away about his book as he chewed on a pen, and Stan sitting in his chair, jotting down a line or two of prose or verse that came to him.

He started writing again, and no one cared how messy it looked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, thats a wrap folks
> 
> Sincere shoutout to everyone who read this far in the first place, especially those who commented, and everyone with learning differences. Seriously, we’re badasses!
> 
> i'm thinking of continuing this for the other pines, autistic ford and dipper and adhd mabel. any vote on who's next? im thinking dipper


End file.
